People eating Tide pods

I had heard recently that there was a group of moms who were trying to get Procter & Gamble to stop making Tide laundry detergent pods look so tasty because kids kept eating them.

I got a call from an old friend a little while ago. Her elderly dad is in the hospital in critical condition. He ate a Tide pod . He doesn't have dementia or anything. My best guess is that his failing eyesight and sense of taste led him to believe that he was eating something edible.

Is it possible that Tide pods are just that good? I have some in my laundry room...
1

I still have to ask my little sister what the hell she was thinking when she ate a whole bottle of Tylenol when she was three. I can't really talk, though. I can clearly remember eating as much salt as I could pour down my throat one time, which I promptly barfed on the living room rug.
5

There are lots of things that look like candy. I was shopping tonight and saw what I thought was candy for sale, it was actually erasers designed to look like Twizzlers.
Little kids don't have a good idea of what's safe until they're about 3. They'll eat anything.
7

People need to start leaving bowls of the pods out in their homes, at least if they don't have young children. Think of it as Darwinism in action. I seriously can't think of any reason an adult with all of their faculties would eat one.
12

We don't buy them for this reason. My two year old has no sense of what to eat and what not to eat. She eats all sorts of bizarre foods and I have to keep an eye on her over it -- banana peels, tinfoil and (I admit we laugh ourselves silly when she does this) dry cat food.
13

We don't buy them for this reason. My two year old has no sense of what to eat and what not to eat. She eats all sorts of bizarre foods and I have to keep an eye on her over it -- banana peels, tinfoil and (I admit we laugh ourselves silly when she does this) dry cat food.

Now you have reminded me of something my older sister and I used to do. You will be disgusted. We would hide in the bathroom with the cat and have cat food parties, in which we poured small portions of Meow Mix on the floor for each of us and ate them. Ah, memories.
14

I looked up a picture and I can see where it might be a problem for young children, but for adults who have all their mental faculties. . .I dunno. I have a general policy of not putting stuff in my mouth without knowing what it is first that's served me pretty well. Any candy that looked like that and was that big, I'd eat by licking first, which would probably cue me in that it wasn't edible.
17

I haven't seen them close up in person. I do have the dishwasher packs. They are coated with a plastic-like substance. Who eats plastic? Sure, a baby or a dog might. But a toddler knows enough to unwrap candy.

And why don't people watch their children and put dangerous things out of harms way?

When we rented a cottage a year or two back, there was a welcome hamper of basic groceries - milk, bread, tea, coffee etc. Also in there were a couple of loose dishwasher tablets - the individually wrapped kind, but not like any I'd ever seen. I at first took them to be some kind of candy, and had to look closely to figure out what they were -- and I'm young, sharp-sighted and immensely intelligent. 22

We've had some cases of dogs eating them, too. I don't know what their excuse is since they don't see colors too well so I doubt they're thinking "ooh, candy!".

That's a strong disincentive to using the Tide pods. I mean, a dog's favorite snacks include cat poop, horse poop, and rotting garbage.

Who wants their clothes to smell like any of those things?????

Re cat food: A friend of ours, years ago, told of how she had to put the cat's dishes somewhere where her toddler couldn't get at them. As she said: the food is harmless enough, she just couldn't stand how her daughter's BREATH smelled after such a snack.

So when visiting friends, with our just crawling daughter, and I heard a suspicious rattling from the next room, I knew to make a run for it and prevent my daughter from eating any more Little Friskies than she had already done.
23

Don't forget about their own poop. My dog once was roaming our backyard and found some ancient mummified turd and promptly commenced to chewing that thing vigorously until he'd eaten the whole thing, like it was crap jerky. Probably the nastiest single thing I ever saw him do, mostly because it didn't appear to be a whim, and didn't seem to be a single-bite thing like most other nasty things he ate.

Nope, he had to work at that turd for a while before he ate the whole thing.

Back to the OP... I think they're bright and colorful, and that's what would attract small children, who then just eat everything because they can. I mean my 2 yr old son was chewing on the butt-end of an aluminum flashlight once!

No idea why an elderly non-demented person would decide to snack on one. Cry for attention maybe?
26

Kids. I once saw my niece, at about 2 or 3 years old, place a cigarette butt in her mouth, and then get this absolutely horrible look on her face. The thing is, she wouldn't -- for whatever reason -- surrender it. She grimaced and fought back tears and then swallowed the damned thing.
29

People need to start leaving bowls of the pods out in their homes, at least if they don't have young children. Think of it as Darwinism in action. I seriously can't think of any reason an adult with all of their faculties would eat one.

I might leave some on the front porches of folks I really, really don't like.
30

I had heard recently that there was a group of moms who were trying to get Procter & Gamble to stop making Tide laundry detergent pods look so tasty because kids kept eating them.

I got a call from an old friend a little while ago. Her elderly dad is in the hospital in critical condition. He ate a Tide pod . He doesn't have dementia or anything. My best guess is that his failing eyesight and sense of taste led him to believe that he was eating something edible.

Is it possible that Tide pods are just that good? I have some in my laundry room...

My youngest is fourteen. Has life gotten so different in the past little over a decade that parents now don't make sure their cleaning products are out of reach of kids younger than five or so? I mean, this is Parenting 101 - keep the cleaning supplies out of reach and behind child locks.

And rather than stop making them, maybe people with little kids who don't want them because of the temptation shouldn't buy them. (They will be pulled from the market anyway - we like to have products like that for travel, and they've never been able to penetrate the market - they disappear. Purex laundry sheets were the bomb for travel. Apparently, people aren't willing to pay a premium for convergence in laundry detergent.)
40

Excuse me, but when you post an MSDS, I have to think it through. Well, the Ethoxylated polyethylene polyamine and the alchoholc (ethoxylated, sulfated, neutrolyzed have about a 5 g/kg LD50 (that's the dose at which half of the test animals died - there will be a different number for rats than for mice, for example). So if you're 150 lbs, you would be 331 kg, which means you'd have to eat 1650 grams or 3.6 pounds for half of you to die (assuming you're a room full of lab animals).

You'd have to eat twice as much alcohols (sulfated, neutrolized). Same with the ethoxylated alcohols (and I don't know why they give that one in mg rather than g). So unless there's a synergistic action between them, the 3.6 pounds is a conservative number to use, especially since they're not telling you how much is inert filler.

According to their website, the pods weigh 0.89 oz apiece. So you'd have to eat 64 of them to be smack in the middle of the theoretical danger zone. And there's only 57 of them in a container. That's going to act as something of a safety net.

Of course, if you're only 20 pounds, it only takes a bit more than 8 of them to have a 50% chance to take you out. Or rather, 8 of them if they were nothing but their active ingredients, which they're not. And if you were a rat, assuming they used rats, which I assume you're not.

Where was I? Oh, yes. Eating pods is bad. They have numbers to prove it. Don't do it.
41

They're a new and exciting form factor, so people will buy them out of curiosity. Sales increase, at least for a little while. Whether they stay increased depends on whether they actually work better.
44

Hell, I know someone - a former Doper, in fact - who once drank a lava lamp (It did not stay down long). Granted, there was considerable alcohol in his system at the time, but people do weird, stupid, dumb stuff all the time.

People eating Tide pods

Pods are also more portable if you have to travel any distance to do your wash - elsewhere in an apartment building, to a laundromat, etc.

They're also easy to give to others to use, which sadly contributed to the death of a 7-month-old whose mother, staying in a shelter, had been given some so she could do laundry. She put them in a basket next to where her infant was sleeping and stepped away for a short time. 47

Excuse me, but when you post an MSDS, I have to think it through. Well, the Ethoxylated polyethylene polyamine and the alchoholc (ethoxylated, sulfated, neutrolyzed have about a 5 g/kg LD50 (that's the dose at which half of the test animals died - there will be a different number for rats than for mice, for example). So if you're 150 lbs, you would be 331 kg, which means you'd have to eat 1650 grams or 3.6 pounds for half of you to die (assuming you're a room full of lab animals).

You'd have to eat twice as much alcohols (sulfated, neutrolized). Same with the ethoxylated alcohols (and I don't know why they give that one in mg rather than g). So unless there's a synergistic action between them, the 3.6 pounds is a conservative number to use, especially since they're not telling you how much is inert filler.

According to their website, the pods weigh 0.89 oz apiece. So you'd have to eat 64 of them to be smack in the middle of the theoretical danger zone. And there's only 57 of them in a container. That's going to act as something of a safety net.

Of course, if you're only 20 pounds, it only takes a bit more than 8 of them to have a 50% chance to take you out. Or rather, 8 of them if they were nothing but their active ingredients, which they're not. And if you were a rat, assuming they used rats, which I assume you're not.

Where was I? Oh, yes. Eating pods is bad. They have numbers to prove it. Don't do it.

A kg is approximately 2.2 lb. So a 150 lb person would weigh ~68 kg not 331 kg. therefore, the LD50 is 340 grams or 3/4 of a lb.
48

Also, damn, that would be 1.6 ounces for a 20 pound child. That's less than one and a half pods. Even assuming there's inert filler, that's solidly in the danger zone with the first pod. Not to mention that a toddler could choke on the plastic envelope.
50

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